As is oft the case with sudden bursts of inspiration, I realized recently that Letterpress would be quite simple to cheat at with a couple of regex and a big enough word list. Also turned out to be quite simple to get the available board via a little pixel munging and some OCR.

And with that, I present to you the Letterpress cheater I've built and hosted over at blah engine.

The Short Version

Friday, October 5th, 2012 was my last day as ceo and employee of
Snoball. It's been a wildly fun ride and it wasn't an
easy decision. The team is incredibly gifted, the platform is world changing,
and the time is right for the idea.

I'll be retaining my seat on the board of directors and am more excited than
ever about the future of the company. It's well built, adding users daily, and
ready to radically alter the way fundraising occurs.

The Less Short Version

About two years ago, we started working earnestly on Snoball with the typical
startup feel -- long hours coding into the night, lots of what-if
conversations. We built a really solid demo and went into fund raising mode.

After closing the funds, we had a celebratory dinner and went back to work the
next day. A couple of months later, we moved the entire company (and very
understanding wives) to Austin. Things were speeding up and we needed to be in
a bigger city.

I was naive going into it. I didn't imagine how big of a factor the legal,
accounting, hr, investor relations, fund raising, etc would all end up being.
I thought I'd be coding on something big, but I let myself end up a beaurocrat.

I loved technology and the team and speaking with donors and nonprofits. I did
not love raising investment, but that became more and more of a focus. It's
wearying. I began to dread working on the thing I'd lived and breathed for so
long.

The tipping point for me was hearing from an advisor, "Your job isn't to focus
on the product. You're the ceo and you need to be always raising money."
Whether I agree with it or not, for the size company we'd become and our level
of revenue, he was right.

It didn't help that I was always sick. It was the stress, no sleep, no
exercise, etc. At home, I was distracted and mentally gone. I'd be around my
family and not even realize they were speaking to me.

Burned out.

It took nearly two years of 80+ hour weeks on Snoball, but it caught up. It
didn't help that I'd been working on my phd for the 2.5 years prior along with
balancing a career and family.

I don't want to do something unless I can do it well. It was time for a
change.

and now

I stewed for a couple of months. I tried to back away from the day to day, but
at this stage of a startup, that's impossible and unfair to everyone else on
the team.

I stepped down. For the good of the company, for the good of my family, for my
health.

I want to be present when my children are on my lap or my arm is around my
wife.

I just want to do things well.

what's next?

As a way of solidifying some of the lessons learned, in the near future I'll be
writing about:

leading a team vs building a product vs building a business

starting a Startup in Small Town, USA

securing investment

startup theater

For now, I just want to kiss my wife, hug my kids, hack on something fun, and
do things well.

You may or may not have noticed, but my blog is suddenly much farther behind the times than it used to be.

I had some server issues on my personal site and one of the side effects is that my db files got corrupted. I didn't lose anything except about 3 blog posts and honestly if I wanted to do some digging, I could find a recent enough backup with them. It's not a high priority...

So - just to catch anyone up to speed. The whole family has moved back to Austin as of October 2011. I co-founded a little startup Snoball that's growing pretty nicely and we just needed to be near the heavier tech industries here to help the company grow a bit more.

My PhD is temporarily on hold (startup... 3 kids...) but I WILL FINISH IT SOMEDAY.